To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface [Hardcover]

To The River is a gentle, wise and riddling book. Its prose, like the river it describes, flows intricately, unpredictably and often beautifully, carrying the fascinated reader onwards. --Robert Macfarlane

Nature Writing is the new Rock 'n' Roll. --The Times

In this richly descriptive book, Laing succeeds superbly in delineating our often fraught, but nevertheless enduring relationship with water. --Sunday Times

Beautifully written ... A great read that will make you want to head to the Sussex countryside. --Woman

A missive filled with erudite observations of the land and water in the heady in-breath of summer . . . its beauty and conclusions find a critical hold in both academic and emotive axes. --Skinny

A refreshing, and inspiring, real-life story ... Relive Laing's journey and you'll be inspired to get out into nature more often. --Psychologies

This is Laing's first book and, without wanting to sound too gushing her writing at its most sublime reminds me of Richard Mabey's nature prose and the poetry of Alice Oswald. Like these two, and John Clare before them, Laing seems to lack a layer of skin, rendering her susceptible to the smallest vibrations of the natural world as well as to the frailties of the human psyche. --Times

A magical book . . . her dreamy prose evokes a modern Alice, an hallucinatory tale told with one hand trailing in cool green water, while she wishes out folklore and science, history and biography . . . There is real delight in this debut. By turns lyrical, melancholic and exultant, To the River just makes you want to follow Olivia Laing all the way to the sea. --Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph

Arrestingly beautiful . . . This is an uplifting book, which not only develops into a work of considerable richness, but as the river reaches the open sea, expresses its message of hope with increasing lyricism and uncluttered simplicity. --Evening Standard

A gentle, wise, observant book, both sparkling and mysterious. In fluid, meditative prose . . . Laing describes not just what she sees but the parallel narratives of her inner life. . . Laing's writing is a joy. . . [she] has a gift for conjuring the loveliest of the countryside and the creatures that inhabit it, and in her hands, the changing land and riverscapes are imbued with wonders and filled with stories. --Metro

It's hard not to warm to Laing as a guide . . . The writing, at its best, is wonderfully allusive and precise . . . The book's subject and structure fuse pleasingly, weaving and meandering, changing pace and tone, pooling into biographical, mythical or historical backwaters before picking up the thread of Laing's riparian journey again.
--Observer

...a beguiling fusion of biography, history, nature writing and memoir. --Sunday Express Magazine

[It is] Laing's lyrical description of nature that makes the book shine. --Financial Times

Olivia Laing is a writer and editor. Between 2007 and 2009, she was the Observer's Deputy Books Editor. She continues to write and review extensively for the Observer, TLS, New Statesman and Guardian, among other publications. She also has a first class BSc (Hons) in herbal medicine, and practised as a medical herbalist for several years before becoming a journalist, specialising in the treatment of anxiety and depression.